Actually, open is good. When the shield (really a reflector) is closed, the core goes critical. Basically, the shield is made of mirrors that reflect neutrons back into the core, knocking more neutrons loose which then get reflected back in, at the point of criticality creating a feedback loop that will run away- a huge explosion. The closer the sphere is to fully closed, the more energy generated and the more radiation emitted.

We haven’t tried this one yet. I’m willing to give it a go!

Nazis are people I don’t like. The political ideology is the reason I dislike them, not the other way ‘round.

Love you too, bb.

Appreciate the skepticism regardless!

Check the color of the dots, my friend. Red is the true value, blue is the survey participants’ estimate.

No u

Who taught grandpa how to use Lemmy?

What does this have to do with the post you’re replying to?

Every week you have 15 people sitting in a circle hanging on your every word for two whole hours. And they keep coming back. That’s a lot of good friends, man! If they were there in person we’d all wonder if you were a cult leader.

I did a little digging. The heat of decay (so plutonium 238 just sitting around, not burning) is about .48 kcal/hr per gram. So if we were able to convert that energy to ATP like we do carbohydrates, eating about 300g of plutonium would be like eating a twinkie (150kcal) every hour. In about 88 years the energy output of that plutonium would have reduced to about a half-twinkie per hour.

Assuming you need 2000 kcal per day to maintain weight, that’s only 83 kcal per hour needed. So, if you could survive eating it and actually utilize the energy generated, you’d be set for life on food after eating less than 300g. We’d have to come up with a dosing schedule or you’d have to work out pretty hard as a young person to keep from getting fat.

The heat of combustion for plutonium based on a very cursory search (take it with a grain of salt) is about 1 kcal/g. So assuming your body could oxidize it, you’d get a one-time burst of about 2 twinkies worth of energy immediately upon eating that 300g.

Oh no!

Salmon. Don’t worry about it.

I can still huff them though, right? How else will I know when my reaction is done?

Technically it measures how much you can heat up a known volume of water if you burn the food. We have no way of measuring how much of that energy released by combustion actually gets absorbed and translated to ATP in the body, but it’s the best estimation we have of the relative energy content of foods.

There’s some carbohydrates, proteins, and fats that our bodies don’t seem to convert to energy (or only partially convert) but still technically contain “calories” because they’re combustible. Sugar alcohols, fiber, etc.

Plutonium doesn’t combust, but it would heat up water in a calorimeter. Really the test method’s applicability kind of falls apart when you start testing undigestible materials.

Look at how they massacred my boy